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Commuity News April 29th

April 29th, 2010

Hey, the second edition of our community news is out. It is divided between news around the Ben NanoNote, SAKC, Milkymistm, OpenWrt and miscellaneous items :)

Ben NanoNote

Xiangfu posted a report on disassembling
David published a video showing the communication between his Ben and an Arduino board

Xiangfu presented a new project – “xbboot” – aimed at replacing the current usbboot as the main tool to reflash the Ben
Ernest Kugel posted he got xburst tools working on Slackware
David created a logo contest for the OpenWrt splash screen
Mirko re-raised the environment / identity partition issue

SAKC

Adam sourced all parts necessary for the next small run of SAKC, and sent a package to Carlos which Carlos already received in Bogota. That includes LCMs, FPGAs, crystals, even some HopeRF modules to play with. Carlos is now waiting for his new PCBs to arrive (currently scheduled for May 5) before starting to mount the next load of SAKC boards. We don’t know yet how many fully working boards we will have in the end, but if you are interested in one please speak up. They will go to people who can contribute back the most…
Carlos reported he has a soft MIPS processor from Open Cores working on SAKC FPGA

Milkymist

Sebastien announced the release of Milkymist 0.5
Sebastien presented new Milkymist Logos and Stickers
Sebastien congratulated Yann on his GSoC project which will serve as a basis for the future OS of Milkymist
Adam finished a first pass of routing of the PCB of the Milkymist One interactive VJ station, currently under review.

OpenWrt

Mirko announced the plan to release different flavors of the uboot, the rootfs as well as the kernel, among them a Debian compatible kernel image

Misc

David announced Tuxbrain was chosen to be one of the representatives of the Open Economy sector in the 20+20 project of Escuela de Organizacion Industrial (Industrial Organization School)
David send a list of events organized by the Spanish copyleft hardware community happening in may
Mirko announced changes in the wiki and Wolfgang gave more details
Wolfgang announced the upgrade of indefero to version 1.0
Wolfgang setup public searchable archives for the #qi-hardware IRC channel on freenode, and all commits into projects at projects.qi-hardware.com will trigger a 1-line commitlog into #qi-hardware as well.

Posted in News, blog, planet

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a small universal tool to control your “Makers” projects and toys? Wouldn’t it be great if you could rely solely on copyleft hardware instead of taking a detour via a black box?

We certainly think so. We’ve long been hoping to find ways of making different open and copyleft hardware platforms talk to each other and today it finally happened!

David of Tuxbrain announced that he managed to get his Ben and an Arduino setup to talk to each other. In a video he uploaded you can see how he boots the Ben and tells a connected Arduino board to switch a small light on and off again. This might not sound very impressive, but it is a great first step. We hope his example will inspire other copyleft hardware and maker enthusiasts to create nifty setups using a Ben plus Arduino + X :)

If you have questions or ideas, make sure to read the Qi Wiki and subscribe to the developer mailinglist.

Posted in News, blog, planet

Community News April 12th

April 12th, 2010

Hey,

this is the first issue of the Qi community news. It tries to capture events, discussions and developments in the Qi community. This issue tries to capture the developments over the past three weeks.

Mirko L. announced a new official Image
Highlights of the new image:
- music player GMU added
- gmenu2x as graphical launcher
- faster boot time due to rootfs split

OpenWrt 10.03 Backfire was released and the Ingenic Xburst platform is now officially supported

Mark Adrian Bell created a HowTo about Time settings on the NN and how to use the NN as a calendar

Wolfgang announced an IRC webchat as an easy way to get support here at Qi

lots of movement on the debian front, with a compile flag that could solve the problems

Zeartul announced that with the current kernel the NN is now completely compatible with Dingoo A320 games

Richard Weinberger proposed splitting the rootfs in two in order to save boot time

Wejp released gmu 0.7.0, a multi platform music player

Gmu on Ben NanoNote

Wolfgang improved the wiki, adding a threaded forum, support for anonymous edits (hopefully spam-safe), support for OpenID, PDF previews, timeline, charts, external data. GraphViz and SiteChart were removed because nobody used them and they are not maintained in the MediaWiki SVN.

Jonathan Nieder proposed some ideas how to get xburst-tools into Debian, along with some patches to get things started.

David Samblas published a tutorial on how to port a simple app (gnuchess) to NanoNote using OpenWrt build system

Rubén Berenguel ported Gnugo to the Ben, and proposed several other math related packages to continue with (pari/gp, octave, gforth).

Carlos Camargo uploaded a video showing SAKC as an oscilloscope.

SAKC as a simple scope.

Guylhem posted binaries to flash the NanoNote from OS X

/mirko

Posted in News, blog, planet

how did we get here

March 10th, 2010

Sharism has launched, the NanoNote is widely available and the pieces for other copyleft hardware projects are coming together. It is time to take a step back, pause for a minute and look at the road behind us. Not to wonder, but to realise what we have accomplished and what we still want to achieve. This is the first of a serious of posts shedding light on the history and more importantly the vision of Sharism at Work.

Moving through the history of the different personalities in our team, there are countless anecdotes and dreams that played their part. However, there are three things that always come up: security, the drive for freedom and the wish for true innovation.

After having worked in various companies and projects ranging from simple web development to complex, embedded systems all of us realised the great danger for the user’s privacy and security. Do you know what all the chips in your all-you-ever-want phone do? Are you sure that only you can control all data on your devices? Sure, this sounds paranoid, but think about it. Recent developments, such as the “Telekom scandal” in Germany and the IPRED law in Sweden have shown that customer data is not private per se. Play with this scenario a bit longer and you will see that the step to using micro chips to gather information on the individual user is not that big and who can be sure that it hasn’t been taken already? So our answer is: know your device! Only once the user has knowledge of ever piece of technology in his/her hardware and can decide what should or shouldn’t happen, do we regain real privacy and are free again.

Running whatever you want, whenever you want it is of course a huge aspect in freedom. Who is to say that your piece of hardware can only be used for this one particular action? Or what if you wanted to adapt a device to fit your needs? Right now you have almost no chance of getting exactly what you want. There will always be trade offs. We want to create a culture where sharing hardware designs is as common as sharing software. Imagine development kits for handhelds, a beginners kit for mobiles or a book titled “How to build your own toaster”. Why would we not take the liberty to build exactly what ‘we’ want, not what ‘they’ give us? You do it every day already, when you mix and match the software you want, and need, on your computer. Of course hardware is more complex and we don’t want to reinvent everything over and over again.

Inventions and innovation have become so complex that they are almost out of reach for the simple person. Even huge companies struggle to get the basics every now and again. The vast spectrum of products that are almost alike, and yet have different qualities and different values of effectiveness, shows that due to modern culture we reinvent stuff all the time. Looking at new technologies as the prime example. Once a new product is released, the other players on the market try to offer the same or similar functionality, but they have to start all over again. Just think. 5 R&D centers trying to innovate will fight the same problems and the same hurdles to achieve a single goal. Wouldn’t it be just natural if they’d work together? Isn’t the very basis of human interaction collaboration? We are not advocating a single R&D effort but innovation on a whole new level, where knowledge and resources are combined to create true competition on quality rather than just simple features.

To be continued :)

Posted in News, planet